Avoriaz

A car-free resort on a shelf above Morzine

Avoriaz is a French mountain resort within the commune of Morzine, built on a shelf high above the town of Morzine itself, in the Portes du Soleil. It is a genuinely car-free resort: vehicles are banned, and in winter transport around the resort is by horse-drawn sleigh and snowcat. That single rule defines the experience, and it gives the place a stillness that resorts with roads through them cannot match. Avoriaz is a resort rather than an old village; one of its principal owners is Pierre & Vacances, a tourism and real estate development company.

The skiing

The figures listed for Avoriaz, 600 km of pistes and 196 lifts, are those of the whole Portes du Soleil, the linked area of which Avoriaz is part. Six hundred kilometres is enormous, and nobody skis all of it in a week; the sensible way to read the figure is that you will not run out of new pistes. The lift count of 196 says the same thing from the other direction: there is a great deal of infrastructure, and it is spread across a very large area.

Avoriaz’s own slopes lie between 1,800 m and 2,466 m. The base altitude is the key figure. At 1,800 m the resort itself is higher than the top station of some lower ski areas, and the top at 2,466 m clears the 2,200 m line at which altitude starts to make a difference to snow cover. Avoriaz is tagged snow-sure, and that is the reason. The vertical on the home mountain is a modest 666 m, but that hardly matters with the rest of the Portes du Soleil to play with.

Who it suits

No difficulty split is published for the domain, but a car-free, high-altitude resort with a huge linked area behind it is, above all, a family resort and an intermediate’s resort: easy to live in, hard to exhaust. The position above Morzine means the old town is close for anyone wanting a change of scene, and the sleighs and snowcats are part of the appeal rather than an inconvenience; they are not a novelty for photographs but the resort’s actual transport. It is also worth being clear about the difference in scale between the home mountain and the domain: Avoriaz’s own 666 m of vertical is a fraction of the Portes du Soleil’s reach, and most visitors treat the resort as a base for the whole area.

Practicalities

Geneva airport is roughly 51 km away as the crow flies, an unusually short hop for a major resort. The season runs from December to April. The resort’s official website covers lift passes and conditions.